The present invention relates to electronic equipment with a tone generating function such as an electronic musical instrument, an electronic portable calculator with a tone generating function, or the like, which effectively adds timbre to a tone.
In an electronic musical instrument such as an electronic organ, conventionally, timbre which resembles timbre produced by natural musical instruments such as piano, flute and the like is added for natural performance. In order to produce timbre for piano, flute and the like, various harmonic sounds of, for example, a sinusoidal waveform are synthesized or specific waveforms inherent to natural musical instruments are stored in a memory and read out as needed.
However, in the above conventional methods, a complex controlling system is required for synthesizing the various harmonic sounds and a large storage is required for storing the specific waveforms of natural musical instruments.
In general, a tone lever or a draw lever for controlling timbre is built into the electronic musical instrument such as an electronic organ. For this reason, the number of switches increases and results in a bulky unit and complex operations. On the other hand, electronic portable equipment such as an electronic portable calculator with which simple melody performance is made by the simple key-in operation with the keys or the like has recently been developed. However, the electronic portable calculator is too compact to incorporate a timbre control switch. Therefore, the timbre of a produced tone becomes monotonous.